Veteran director Arthur Hiller ("The Americanization
of
Emily"/"The
In-Laws"/"Love Story") helms Paddy Chayefsky's black
comedy by missing
a lot of the edginess in favor of shamelessly
trivializing it into an
hysterical
comedy. It was hard to come out of The Hospital
feeling all that well.
It does for civilian life the same thing M*A*S*H and
Catch-22 did for
the
military, skewer the system by those who are the
system. The medical
personnel
consists of jerks, incompetents, the cold-hearted and
indifferent, the
greedy and victims of murder. The message here is how
hospitals treat
patients
as if they were pieces of furniture. What might have
been a riot in
Chayefsky's
head, in the film comes over as crudely funny; it's as
if pissing in
the
wind.

The depressed loner Dr. Herbert Bock (George C.
Scott) is
chief of
staff at a major New York City hospital (filmed at the
Metropolitan
Hospital
on the Upper West Side of Manhattan). The 53-year-old
is suicidal
because
his wife split, he's impotent, overworked,
stressed-out and he's
estranged
from his children. If that weren't enough of a jolt,
everything is
chaotic
at the hospital: patients are dying because of wrong
treatment, such as
incorrect meds and being operated on with incorrect
surgeries. There's
also wholesale stealing of hospital supplies and a
nasty confrontation
with a local action group over slum clearance. If that
weren't enough,
there's a lunatic running around murdering people.
It's like a Marx
Brothers
romp, as both Bock's personal and professional life
are a mess. But the
cynic finds renewed hope when he meets the radical
ex-flower child and
ex-nurse Barbara Drummond (Diana Rigg), a waspish
dropout from Boston's
snobby Beacon Hill, who has come to take her comatose
scheming dotty
father
(Barnard Hughes) back to his dear Apaches in Mexico
where he runs a
Methodist
missionary and where Barbara resides. Barbara and
Herbert each lean on
the other's shoulder to get emotional support, and
after a one-night
stand
the doctor gets it up and gets enough courage to live
for another day.

The gallows humor was the melodramatic farce's
saving
grace; the
film uses its razor-sharp instruments to cut into the
hides of the
insensitive
institutionalized health care providers like Michael
Moore's Sicko does
in 2007 to the fat-cat HMOs. My major gripe was that
it could have been
better, as Chayefsky delivered his part of the bargain
and so did
Scott;
nevertheless the pic flattens out as the director
increasingly loses
his
way in all the bitterness and invented horror stories
and leaves us
dangling
over how to get out of such an irredeemable world
(where modern man is
perceived as forgotten in death).

Chayevsky’s screenplay won an Oscar, while Scott was
nominated for
Best Actor.